Good News Bible

A landmark functional-equivalence Bible, designed for clarity across cultures and reading levels, the Good News Translation—first known as Today's English Version—emerged from the work of the American Bible Society in the mid-twentieth century, initially to serve readers for whom English was a second language, and it soon found a far wider audience. Its scope is the complete Bible, rendered from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek source languages and based on critical original-language texts. Its translation philosophy is that of dynamic, or functional, equivalence, and it stands as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an earlier English version. Among its distinctive features is that its simple language is the result of a translation theory rather than of paraphrase—a point that distinguishes it from freer retellings. Widely distributed and often used in schools, missions, and devotional settings, it shaped later efforts at accessible Bible translation.